Doreen Tuheirwe Mukasa is an assistant lecturer in the Department of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Informatics Technology (SCIT), Makerere University. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Makerere University and a Masters degree in Systems and Software Engineering from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research interests are in software architectures, service centric systems and mobile infrastructures.

“When I saw the advert for the scholarships, I googled WIMEA-ICT to get background information on the project. When I read about the project’s problem case, and especially research component 4 that I specifically applied for, I considered WIMEA-ICT to be a good way to extend my masters research which had focused on how to get information from different services, combine it and present it as one service to an end user,” says Mukasa.

One problem the WIMEA-ICT project cited is the dissemination of weather information which is necessary for use by people in different sectors say, agriculture, health, energy, construction and so on. Mukasa looks to contribute to efficiently disseminating weather information.

“I would like to explore ways of structuring weather information in a way that is useful to a farmer, which will be different from the format relevant to a fisherman, or an engineer or a construction worker. The farmer may be interested say in rainfall and how much it is, while a fisherman is perhaps just interested in information on wind,” she says.

Mukasa’s main objective is to take from weather repositories, structuring and formatting the information in an appropriate manner and to present it in the most efficient and simple ways to users.

And how far has she gone in her research, we ask her, “I participated in the national survey on Weather Information Dissemination Systems in Uganda in November last year along with the lead researchers on this project and the research paper will be out soon. I am working on having my complete proposal by June but currently working on my methodology section,” she intimates.